The present invention relates to photonics techniques. More particularly, the present invention provides methods and structures for attaching optical fiber block to silicon photonics.
Over the last few decades, the use of communication networks exploded. In the early days Internet, popular applications were limited to emails, bulletin board, and mostly informational and text-based web page surfing, and the amount of data transferred was usually relatively small. Today, Internet and mobile applications demand a huge amount of bandwidth for transferring photo, video, music, and other multimedia files. For example, a social network like Facebook processes more than 500 TB of data daily. With such high demands on data and data transfer, existing data communication systems need to be improved to address these needs.
High data rates over 40-Gbit/s or 100-Gbit/s signal transmission through single-mode fiber is a target for the next generation of fiber-optic communication networks in which plenty of applications involve high speed silicon photonics devices. Many of such silicon photonics devices need to properly attach fairly large sized optical fibers to much smaller sized silicon chips. When a group of fibers is to attach a silicon photonics device, yet many problems are associated with variations in fiber end polish qualities, fiber core alignment, and process handling of multiple fibers together. Therefore, improved techniques and structures for attaching a fiber block containing multiple fibers to silicon photonics are desired.